Uri Friedman is deputy managing editor at Foreign Policy. Before joining FP, he reported for the Christian Science Monitor, worked on corporate strategy for Atlantic Media, helped launch the Atlantic Wire, and covered international affairs for the site. A proud native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he studied European history at the University of Pennsylvania and has lived in Barcelona, Spain and Geneva, Switzerland.

October 28, 2012 - 5:00 pm

As a recent BBC World Service poll suggested, Barack Obama would cruise to victory if countries ranging from France to Kenya to Canada could vote in the U.S. presidential election. But a new Peace Index poll reveals that Mitt Romney has a sizable advantage in at least one country: Israel.

The survey, which was conducted last week by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University, found that 57 percent of Jewish Israelis felt that it would be preferable for Romney to win the election from the perspective of Israeli interests, while 22 percent said the same about Obama. Seventy percent of self-identified right-wingers, 54 percent of centrists, and 30 percent of left-wingers surveyed expressed support for Romney. Meanwhile, a plurality of Arab Israelis in the poll preferred Obama (45 percent) to Romney (15 percent).

A Peace Index poll over the summer, when Romney traveled to Jerusalem, yielded similar — if less pronounced — results, with 40 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents supporting Romney and 19 percent backing Obama on a slightly different question: Which candidate would assign "more importance to defending Israel’s national interests?"

In this month’s Peace Index poll, which will be released in full on Monday, 69 percent of Israeli Jews said they do not believe the result of the U.S. election will influence the outcome of upcoming Israeli elections, while 51 percent of Israeli Arabs said they think the U.S. race will have an impact on the Israeli contest. I’ve written before about speculation in the Israeli press that Benjamin Netanyahu could be punished at the polls if Obama wins reelection and bilateral relations suffer because of the Israeli prime minister’s aggressive efforts to establish "red lines" for Iran’s nuclear program during the U.S. campaign.

One surprising result of the BBC World Service poll last week was that the only country where more respondents favored Romney than Obama was Pakistan, where drone strikes and the Osama bin Laden raid have inflamed anti-American sentiment. But the real story there was that most Pakistani respondents were, well, undecided: a whopping 75 percent had no opinion about the candidates. In Israel, at least among Israeli Jews, the preference for Romney appears to be far more resounding.